Three Onion Jam Recipes

I've been doing a lot of canning since April, taking advantage of all the seasonal fruits and vegetables and filling my larder. After a large batch of fruit jam-making, I decided I wanted to balance things out by adding some savory jam, and I got the idea to experiment with onion jam. I found three recipes that looked really good, but I could not narrow it down to just one, so I decided to just make all three!

Here are the three onion jam recipes I made:

Onion & Rosemary Confiturra - from Serious Eats. Notes: This jam is a mix of sweet and sour and herb-y. It might seem like a lot of onions (10 cups of sliced onions!) but remember, they'll soften and shrink when cooked. This recipe filled four jars. Also, I mis-read the recipe. It calls for six sprigs of rosemary. I did not read the recipe all the way through and I stripped the leaves off the rosemary, only to discover that I was supposed to leave the leaves on the stems and fish them out at the end! So now my confiturra has chewy rosemary leaves in it. That's OK, I can spit them out, but I will keep this batch for myself and make another batch to give out as gifts. This one is really good - it filled the house with a wonderful scent and I kept snitching spoonfuls here and there while it was cooking. Oh - and they mean it when they say "keep stirring" in Step 5.

Balsamic Onion Jam - from Coconut & Lime. Notes: The sweetest of the three. This jam is good, but it is my least favorite of the three. I'm not sure what I did wrong, but the onions didn't turn brown after cooking in the brown sugar for 30 minutes like the recipe says, and my batch is a lot paler in color than the photograph on the recipe. I feel like it's missing something, but it's still good. I got two jars out of this batch.

Sweet Onion Jam - from Food & Wine. Notes: The most savory of the three recipes. I think this one is my favorite of the three! I had to really restrain myself from eating any while it was cooking because this recipe is so small - it filled one jar. It contains red wine, red wine vinegar, and grenadine, and has a claret color. I'd definitely like to make more batches of this.

I couldn't find vidalia onions here in San Francisco, so I just used Walla Walla and Maui onions.